The city of Delhi has lived and died many times, it has reinvented itself many times over. In every age, it has had the good and the bad-the mushairas have thrived alongside prostitution rings. Those that have inherited this historical sense know that the good and the bad coexist. They take the darker side of Delhi in their stride…
Kipling’s caricature of the hill-station memsahib is the one that has endured—frivolous, vain, sometimes adulterous, ‘a heartless bitch with an ever tinkling laugh’.Pat Barr has attempted to correct this image by describing the lives of a few women who came to India before the 1857 ‘mutiny’ and who were equal to their men-folk in courage…
As the old song does not have it, old soldiers never die nor fade away, but write memoirs. But let us grant it to them, they usually make a much better job of it than old civil servants. At least General Chaudhuri does. The book is written in crisp and cultivated English, which I attribute less to Sandhurst and the lesser English school…
It is seldom that one finds genuine pleasure in reviewing a book, but involvement in its theme can make the exercise rewarding. Ram K. Vepa belongs to the Indian Administrative service. The blurb describes his book as one written by a ‘practising administrator for the benefit of other administrators’…
History, notoriously, is not about the past.-Amitav Ghosh in The Man Behind the MosqueVishwajyoti’s Ghosh’s Delhi Calm reminds one of the daily calm that is being witnessed along with the daily alarm of scams, jams, inflation and general deflation of spirits. The phrase ‘India shining’ was the buzzword…
Based mainly on Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhramsha texts, the present work is a sequel to P.C Jain’s Labour in Ancient India (1971). Divided into six chapters, it seeks to study the social and economic condition of various categories of Indian…